Welcome to Leadership

After starting my independent school career in a large admissions office at a large boarding school, I moved to a different leadership role in student life at the same school. In my new role, I was supervising dorm heads, faculty – many the age of my parents – and students. I was on the phone with parents, checking in with teachers, and often speaking with counselors, which in those days also happened to be the college counselors. There were lots of moving parts. And then there were the special assignments.

It wasn't long before I began to better understand the meaning of the paragraph in my contract that said I could be assigned "any additional duties" the school needed me to perform for the good of the school.

One of my additional duties was assigning the limited garage space to faculty for the upcoming academic year. When I told colleagues I was the new "assigner of garages," their eyes would grow big, they would smile ruefully, shake their heads, and with a laugh tell me "good luck." I wasn't sure what this all meant, but there was something about it that told me that assigning garages was going to be a no win situation. And so it began. They were lining up outside my door, everyone with a good reason why I should grace them with a garage.

I didn't have a name for what was happening to me yet, just a line outside my door and no idea who deserved to be at the front of it. Not having grown up in a baseball family, I was never initiated into the concept of "big ears," but as I have married into a somewhat fanatical Red Sox tribe, it's now been explained to me. The batter who is taking in all of the voices – the coach, a more experienced teammate, the crowd, the guy on TV, the sports writer – the batter is trying to compromise between all the voices and hasn't built a filter as to who to listen to and what to act on.

That was me in my early weeks in student life. I had big ears. There were just so many people to listen to. Nobody told me who to listen to and who to let in the door. What became clear is that I needed a door policy and I was going to have to design one while a bunch of folks were already lining up.

In the intervening 30+ years, I've sought out the wisdom of others on a whole host of things including how to listen, and at the same time filter out the noise. One of those with wise counsel is Rita McGrath. She makes clear that filtering out the noise isn’t simply about being able to keep your head about you as the volume rises, but it’s also about reducing the chances you’ll get blindsided. She argues that leaders rarely get blindsided because they lack information, but instead, they get blindsided because they never built a habit of discerning the signal from noise.

Noise is one complaint, one bad afternoon, one person who's very upset and very certain of their position whereas, signal is quieter. It repeats. It comes from people who don't talk to each other but somehow converge on saying the same thing. Signal points at something real in the structure of the place, not just something that randomly happened to one family or one faculty member. Noise keeps cutting the line just because it showed up loud, while signal waits patiently at the back until it's too late to matter.

So for those of you about to jump into a formal leadership role, here are a few thoughts:

Don't let volume cut the line. Every community has someone who will find you, every time, about everything. That doesn't make them wrong, but showing up loudest isn't a line pass. Ask yourself who else you'd need to hear from before this issue earns its place near the front.

Don't let certainty cut the line either. The person who tells you something with total conviction isn't more likely to be right than the person who hedges. Early on, certainty can feel like relief — finally, someone who knows what's going on — and that relief is what makes it so easy to wave through. Conviction is a tone, not evidence. Learn to notice when you're trusting someone because they sound sure, not because they've earned it.

Make repetition the actual line pass. One parent's complaint waits its turn. The same complaint from three parents who don't know each other, over a semester, gets to move up. That's a pattern. Most of what reaches you is the first version of something. You're allowed to just note it and let it hold its place, instead of acting on it the moment it arrives.

Think about your door policy before school starts, not once school is in session when your schedule is packed, your in box is full, and there is a line of people telling you they must meet with you. It’s also tremendously helpful for you to find two or three people whose judgment you trust. They can help you sort through the noise. You may also want to consider working with a coach. It’s becoming more and more common for schools to invest in coaching for leaders. Long gone are the days when a coach was usually hired for a leader who was struggling. Now it's seen as an investment in building a strong leadership team.

But back to the line. I'm not telling you to shorten the line. Leaders who stop listening are worse off than leaders with big ears – at least the big-eared ones are still letting people in. I'm telling you to run the door, so the sheer number of people asking for your attention doesn't get mistaken for how much any one of them deserves it. The people who last in this work are the ones who got comfortable, early, deciding who doesn't get to cut the line.